THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES AWAY
The Preshow Entertainment was GEOLOGY ROCKS. This is a homegrown video of students singing songs and replacing the lyrics with words like magma, sedimentary, lava flow ("Don't go metamorphosing to try and please me"). It's a class from Youngstown Ohio with acquaintance Dr. Ray as the professor.
I give the concept an A+. It's college kids being goofy and letting loose, hard to do in a geology class. Some committed, others would rather be anywhere else but here tonight. If this were FAME, Debbie Allen would come out at the end of each karaoke performance. But we're the judges, and we all agreed on the three girls who did their song to I WILL SURVIVE. They were having fun, AND they had choreography! I imagine they called that choreographer guy that helped the cheerleaders in BRING IT ON. And Dr. Ray himself did three songs in 3 different personas.
The movie randomly selected was:
THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES AWAY
"If you had a mirror that only reflected what you used to be, would you want to look into it?"
That bad bad bad bad line is the best line in the movie.
This is a movie from 1999 (when people knew how to party) that I taped because Rachael Leigh Cook wants me, and she's in the movie, so I thought it only fair to watch it. You know, if she came over right now and said, "Here I am!, but only if you watch THE BUMBLEBEE FLIES AWAY again", I may have to decline*.
This is as close to bad as you can get without being RIVER RED. In fact, it's a bit similar to RIVER RED. A pretentious, play-dialogue, vanity piece I never heard of written and directed by people who never wrote or directed again. Based on a book (I never heard of), it stars Elijah Wood, which is okay, but then we have Janeane Garafalo as a doctor, walking around in a lab coat. I remember comedian Jeffrey Ross saying to Janeane, "Just because they give you a script doesn't mean you have to do it."
Roger Rees (Joe Shakespeare, Robin Colcord on CHEERS) is a DeNiro-looking doctor whose experimental treatment of cancer patients involves hypnosis- erasing the patient's memory that they have cancer, so it tricks the brain into thinking it doesn't. Apparently, you lose your identity, but your cancer is gone. A guy Elijah meets there is dying of bone cancer. I think (really not sure) that the conflict here is whether it's better to live without knowing who you are, or simply die. Watching this movie, either one sounded good to me.
I made this movie sound so much better than it is, so in case you think it had merit, let me drill this into you. IT DOESN'T. The end.
The end of the movie is like the end of RADIO FLYER, where they build a wheelchair type go cart so the dying guy can ride it off the roof. What is it with Elijah Wood flying things off rooftops? Is he doing that in RINGS 3 as well? Is it in his contract? "I like the script. Make it so I can fly a sled off a roof at the end and I'll do it."
And if you think, "Oh, he's being cute again, calling it a really bad movie," here:
FILM CRITIC.COM
An amnesiac teen (Wood) struggles to regain his memory... or does he??? By the time the deep dark secret is revealed, you may not care any more. And Janeane Garofalo as an experimental medical researcher is just about as inexplicable as the film's title.
Fly already.
INTERNET REVIEWS
1-The film, however, is beyond dreadful. It's so bad it's not even bad-funny. Maudlin, boring, awkward and in poor taste. Avoid at all costs.
2- There ought to be some kind of prosecution to punish producers from financing screenplays this stupid. I feel that some kind of criminalization of bad film might prevent more films this idiotic from being made.
3- This is a film that tries so earnestly to be taken seriously and yet it is just so ridiculously idiotic, one finds it almost impossible to grant it any respect. The pace in monotonous, primarily because nothing much happens.
4- This is some of the most mind-numbingly bad dialogue I have ever had the misfortune to hear. Bumblebees actually crawling inside my ears and stinging my eardrums would be preferable to hearing Elijah Wood robotically spit out his pseudo profound lines.
Now, just to be fair, here's a review from someone who liked the film-
The bumblebee flies anyway is a splendidly done, beautiful and heart tugging movie. plus it had Elijah Wood in it HOTTIE
*I said "may".
Tags: random movie club, the bumblebee flies away, geology rocks, elijah wood, rachael leigh cook
